


In which Darcy wears sheepskin

by Kes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2013-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-23 03:20:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 11,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/617505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back when politics looked like the way to power, she studied that. Then Thor fell out of the sky and into Jane’s arms, and Darcy saw that there were more kinds of power, kinds that weren’t confined to one country or even one world. She wanted it.</p><p>(Darcy is an emergent supervillain, and goes looking for power and influence through Asgardian magic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Back when politics looked like the way to power, she studied that. It hadn’t really looked like working for her. She was too sarcastic, too assertive, too female. She applied to a dozen experience placements, and all the ones she’d wanted turned her down. The one she hadn’t wanted, the one her tutor pushed her into applying for because ‘The lady’s really nice, and I worked with her father - you’d learn loads, and it’s always better to have a few different disciplines under your belt,’ - that had been the one that had replied.

So she’d gone and hated it and used the time to listen to more music - because it was fun, and because she spent enough time on the internet to know just what her own generation liked in its politicians. Jane was all right, and once she even said, ‘Go for it, after all, the sky’s the limit,’ and gestured at her work.

Then Thor fell out of the sky and into Jane’s arms, and Darcy saw that there were more kinds of power, kinds that weren’t confined to one country or even one world. She wanted it.

\- - -

As soon as she got back to college she switched her major. Jane Foster had inspired her, she said; there’ll be time for politics later, I don’t need a degree in it and astrophysics is great, she said. Some of her tutors looked hurt, but kids changed majors all the time. No sweat.

She kept in touch, too. Normally her attitude to friends was love ‘em and leave ‘em, but she didn’t just keep Jane on Facebook - she emailed her relentlessly, quizzed her about her work, sometimes did the same to Selvig. They poked fun at her sometimes, teased her about the wormhole thing, but answered her questions good-naturedly enough except when confidentiality agreements got in the way. That didn’t matter.

She got as much as she could about SHIELD out of them, and then went snooping around herself. After all, it wasn’t like most government departments had great network security - she’d started hacking the Pentagon for fun when she was seventeen.

Slowly things began to fall into place. She understood things now. And the more she understood, the more she realised that she would get nowhere alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This whole fic was posted to tumblr way back when I didn't have AO3, but I started updating again)


	2. Chapter 2

When the Tesseract was stolen, Darcy knew about it. She hadn’t been able to get into the project files, even by attacking through the NASA angle which normally had worse security. But the chatter on the lines told her everything she needed to know.

For a while, she contemplated diving into the fray herself, making her power grab now - but the time wasn’t right. Striking before she was ready, before she had more knowledge, more support, more everything, would be picking up the Idiot Ball big time. So she called in sick to college and put a rolling news channel on while she dug around the outskirts of SHIELD’s networks, waiting for the shit to hit the fan. This show she’d enjoy. Then she’d bide her time and strike at the victor - one less enemy.

To their credit, they put a good spin on the Stuttgart incident. It hit the news, but that was more for the spectre of Captain America rising from the tomb and showing his metaphorical nail-holes than for Reindeer Games. The nickname was one of the few things she liked about what she knew of Stark.

Obviously she had a good ogle at all three of the people who turned up on the ground in the square. Nice, nice, urgh Stark. Hey, if she was going to launch her career into the realm of interplanetary power, it was a good idea to check out the people she’d be hob-knobbing with. And hopefully other kinds of knobbing…

It wasn’t the main reason she was going for this career. It wasn’t even in the top ten reasons. But good-looking people? Definitely a perk.

This Loki - brother of Thor - was all over the place. She frowned into her screens. It seemed like he wanted power, but his tactics were bad and sometimes she was much more convinced that all he wanted was attention. His actions made it look like he’d done no research on Earth, expected just to do a bit of shiny pretty magic and reinforce it with some shock and awe and everyone would bow at his feet. That wasn’t effective strategy. And then when she got at reports of what had actually happened - she had to shake her head. Hadn’t he read the Evil Overlord list? Hadn’t he handed bits of it to every one of his minions?

The Tesseract left the world and she was sorry. Then she looked again at the Hulk and realised why it would probably be safer to get at it in Asgard. Jane was nearly there, and Darcy was in the process of surreptitiously building her own lab under a false name so that when she was ready she could strike with no-one the wiser.

It was a month later, when Jane’s Einstein-Rosen Bridge equipment was nearly finished and Darcy was selling her hacking skills for the money to continue, that she got the call.

“Hey, Thor came back - I thought I’d call and ask if you fancied a trip to Asgard? I’m going for a few months to work with the Asgardian scientific community, obviously you don’t have to be there for that long…”

Joy bubbling through her, she accepted enthusiastically. This was going to be so much easier than she thought it would be.


	3. Chapter 3

If Jane was to be studying, Darcy would too. After all, in Asgard science and magic were the same thing - it would be easy to slip from one to the other. And it was the other she wanted, since the Tesseract’s abilities were so far beyond Earth science that it might as well be magic. Even if it was magic that Earth - and Earthlings - could manipulate.

She took her taser, and her camera, and her computer, and several hard drives that had as much information about everything as she could cram onto them.

It was a lovely place, and so were the people - while Jane worked with the Asgardian scientists, she slipped in with students of science/magic/whatever. The students were normally brighter than the teachers anyway, and far less guarded about their tongues. So she flirted and she learned and sometimes she had a one night stand with a bubbly sorceress or a fumbling scientist, and no-one seemed to notice that she was learning - she called her camera a study aid and took photos of everything, but mostly the pages of the tomes that she was slowly learning to read. Good thing she’d studied runes way back when in the first year as an extra.

What was weird was that Asgardians didn’t seem to sleep. So they had to have rooms specially furnished, and no-one noticed if she spent too much time in there trying spell after spell. At first they all failed. Soon, the simple ones worked. It was science - formulae and calculations that Asgardians could do in their heads in a split second. She programmed a calculator in her netbook that could do it for her in a bit more time.

\- - -

She got stuck a lot. There was one basic formula that was vital for basically every spell ever and without understanding it she was stuffed. So she put on her best dumb-college-kid face - and a low cut top (‘What?’ she thought angrily at the mental image of her mother. ‘My choice!’) - and took herself off to one of the older Asgardian scientists, one of the ones Jane rarely if ever saw. If asked, she’d just say that one of her new friends, oh, she didn’t know which, they were blond maybe? had told her that he was good at explaining things and she was curious.

It made her smile when she troped the scene as Merlin and Nimue.

He explained it with a lot of diagrams, which she photographed - ‘yeah, I have to do this for all my teachers on Midgard, it’s a study aid’ - and memorised later. It made sense. Well, most of it. Her mind flicked back to the crash-course on particle physics she’d nagged for in college and after feeding it through the computer about six hundred different ways she added in a new variable, as well as a pinch from the packet she’d brought from Earth.

When the illusory building block - start small, Darcy, start small - appeared in front of her, she picked it up and it felt heavy to the touch. Then she brought another formula to bear and it scattered into dust.

Apparently either no-one had thought of using mass as well as energy for their illusions, or it all hinged on Earth.

A smile flickered tiredly on her face. For the first time, she was applying herself and actually working flat out - and for the first time, she could feel the life pulsing through her. Yes, she’d liked her old life - but now she felt almost high on her own calculations, her own ideas, and these damn formulae. It was spectacular.

She wasn’t going to fall into that cliche ‘better than sex’ thing though. Because get real. Maybe for some people it was, but for her? Hell no.


	4. Chapter 4

The problem she was running up against, constantly, was the whereabouts of the Tesseract. You can’t steal what you can’t find. And sadly Asgard had no computer network to hack into. She tried casually asking Thor, but his face darkened and he told her he’d sworn to tell no-one. Lawful Good stuff like that was just aggravating.

But in her reading, it became increasingly obvious that the Tesseract was not the only absurdly powerful object in Asgard. That was… something, even if she didn’t know what the rest were or where they were kept yet either.

What she did know, from ‘accidentally’ getting lost round about the time Thor vanished from Jane’s sight every so often, was where their prison was. And since Thor was going there daily or whatever the equivalent was in Asgard, it stood to reason that that was the one Loki was in.

Since coming here, she’d learned more about the would-be conqueror of Earth - enough that she was pretty sure she could manipulate him into giving her the information she needed. If she had to bring him with her, well - she had a taser and anyway he could be an asset. He might even teach her more of the magic.

The plan slotted into place surprisingly easily. Her illusions were good enough to fool most of the Asgardians - she had to actually go to the rooms around the library to find someone who understood even the simplest of the formulae, understanding magic wasn’t normal. The general Asgardian guards, trained to recognise weightless Asgardian illusions, had no chance.

Now to get sick and turn invisible.

Darcy made sure she looked appropriately like death, but remembered just in time that they had healing stones and blamed it on her period rather than a cold. Before she retired to her room she made weak threats of death and fire for anyone who disturbed her, and sealed the room with magic. She crossed her fingers that Heimdall had listened when she’d told him, in no uncertain terms, just how creepy she found the whole idea of him being able to see her in her bedroom. There was a general umbrella spell, and a spell to stop words being heard by unintended ears - she hoped those would work as well.

Instead of using the Asgardian methods of making herself invisible, she took a leaf out of her favourite book when she was fourteen and attached the spell to a blanket. The opacity of the blanket should make it much harder to see her. Then she snuck down to the prison and walked right in. They were very confident in their security, evidently.

Loki was just sitting there when she found him - apparently the Asgardians didn’t believe in televisions in cells - but he noticed the magic. Her magic. In one swift moment he split in two, leaving one self on the bench and coming to the clear wall. She didn’t step back. She’d heard the recordings of that conversation he’d had with Agent Romanoff. He didn’t scare her.

“What childish trick is this? Has Asgard become so tedious that I must become a source of entertainment?”

“Hey! First I get carded when I go out and then you start calling me a child! I’m hurt, dude. I came to help you out.”

There was a split second when his mask slipped, and she caught hope and need and fear. “Forgive me if that isn’t my… first conclusion. I am done with mortal ensnarement,” he said, and turned away.

“I study political science.” Facts? Who needed facts? “Historically there’s been less conflict if people were all clustered around a throne. It’s political good sense. Your ideas are pretty good.”

“Do you think I care about the ideas of a faceless, nameless mortal?”

She shrugged, even though he couldn’t see her, and pulled out her mental file on what he’d said at the trial. “Well, if you don’t want out of here before whoever’s after you gets here, that’s up to you. By the way, my name’s Darcy Lewis. Thor might have mentioned me? I kinda tazered him, hit him with his own weapon?”

It took three steps backwards for him to reply, “Tell me your plan.”


	5. Chapter 5

There were formulae glowing in the air when she got back, and Loki had a glint in his eye that she didn’t like. Sternly she reminded herself that he would almost certainly try to deceive her.

The first thing she learnt was the numbers and calculations that would let her sift through the worlds and part the curtains between them. There was no chance of actually practicing them in the prison, so she took the photographs back to her room and pored over them. Sometimes he’d hesitated a bit too long between explanations, and she was sure there were at least four places he’d lied to her. Probably places where it wouldn’t hinder the overall plan, but would make this way much less efficient and so give him the upper hand with world-hopping.

Carefully she broke the equations down into their constituent parts and took them separately to some of her new friends, telling them she’d found them but thought she saw a mistake. After asking her where she’d got them - ‘Some old tome, I wasn’t really looking’ - they pored over them. Two had definite problems. One of them was apparently completely correct. The fourth was ambiguous.

Again she fed them into the computer back to front and sideways. If there was any chance this could go wrong, she wasn’t doing it - there was all the time in the world to sort it out. At last she thought it was all correct, and, heart pounding, executed the manouevre.

She was falling, even though she was holding onto the bedpost - falling through blackness and hurtling through space - the formulae pushed her this way and that - her feet hit the ground lightly, and she looked out into the middle of Paris.

Tentatively she let go, clutching the computer still. She was now fully in Midgard. Now to see whether she could get back to Asgard. If she couldn’t - well, magic went wrong sometimes, didn’t it?

But she could. Again she plummetted through solid earth and sky and stars, and ended up sitting winded on her own floor once more. It worked. She couldn’t see where she was going and she couldn’t quite manage the more complicated calculations that let you see the pathways you were taking and change course in the middle, but it was enough.


	6. Chapter 6

“So, what are we stealing?” She shifted tack abruptly to derail the argument that was rapidly brewing about the misinformation he’d given her; Loki was emphatically denying giving her the wrong information and she knew perfectly well he had. It wasn’t worth the waste of time. Enough that he knew she knew. “And where from?”

“What?” The change of tack caught him off balance.

She shrugged. “Well, we can have an insultathon or we can actually get down to some plotting, I’m pretty sure that helps in the execution of plots. I’m thinking not the Tesseract, don’t get me wrong I like it and it does some neat things, but it’s probably well and truly stashed away where neither of us know where it is so it’s gonna be simpler to get something else. What is there?”

“There is a vault in the heart of Asgard, suspended in the water well, where the great weapons are held. There is a gauntlet, encrusted with gems of power; Surtur’s Eternal Flame; the Warlock’s Eye; the tablet that shows how the owner can achieve their full evolutionary potential; a scrying ball. Some are best left alone, especially by the likes of you.”

“Again with this superiority complex. Let’s weigh things up. The gauntlet, what about that?”

“The gauntlet must remain where it is! It draws my enemies to it.”

She made a mental note to try to get more out of him about exactly who was after him. “Ookay. The flame.”

“It never goes out, gives off pure dark energy and at Ragnarok it will light the Twilight Sword. It increases the powers of anyone who can touch it without being burnt as well.”

Stealing fire from the gods. Whatever next. “That’s going on the possibles. Can we touch it without getting burnt?”

“Asgard has never managed it,” he said, and she thought he looked at his own hands.

“Still, dark energy is what magic runs on so that’s useful. What was next, the Warlock’s Eye?”

“It has power, although it is slippery and hard to use.”

Mentally she’d already crossed off the tablet, since she had the horrible feeling that the formula would have different effects on both of them and that could end up going very wrong for her. “So does the scrying ball only scry?”

“If you know where to look. It can also serve as a gateway between worlds.”

“Ehh, boring. We can already do that. So, fire first choice and then Warlock’s Eye. Just gotta hope there’s no eagles on hand.”

Keep him off balance, she thought as she left. Yes, she had the advantage that he knew basically nothing about her, but he could still be dangerous - with a secret smile, she added ‘and I should know,’ - and she still hadn’t stopped boggling at Odin’s likeness to the guy who named the Hannibal Lecture trope. It served to keep her on guard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't do too well with my research into the properties of the stuff in Odin's vault, so I started making stuff up.


	7. Chapter 7

At least that argument had served as a reminder not to underestimate her. Underestimating the humans last time had left Loki with joints that would probably always crack and hurt when he moved, and the reminder brought the anger bubbling to the surface again. They shouldn’t be able to do that. This - Darcy Lewis - shouldn’t be able to do Asgardian magic - but then she shouldn’t have been able to knock out his brother either. He snarled.

While she was here, he swallowed his anger, pretended, played the role of the scheming prisoner willing to do anything to escape. But alone, with the resentment festering in his bones, he plotted.

If she failed, it was easy; tell his dolt of a brother everything and say she used magic to stop him saying anything earlier. It should mean that he could continue with the original plan with a lot more ease. If she succeeded, the Gauntlet and the Tesseract would continue to draw - he spat rather than think the name - towards Asgard. It wouldn’t take much to get her out of the picture, and then he could lie in wait in relative safety. With the fire, he could even resist attacks; yes, it was probably best to tell her the truth now and see just how far she could get before he watched her fall, as surely she would. Perhaps he could get a power base, although that would involve tiresome hours of trying to win a load of tedious people over now he was deprived of the Asgardian staff.

 _He_ would hit Asgard hard, wipe out most of that idiotic army that his brother would almost certainly insist on commanding. Thor’s survival was something he emphatically did not care about. Honestly.

Loki had got very good at steering himself away from the painful tangle of feelings that shook themselves loose every time he thought of his brother. Quickly he ran the plan forwards in his mind.

With Asgard’s normal hope shattered, once there was nothing between him and ultimate power, he could swoop in. The fire could - even if his hunch that he could indeed touch it without burning proved wrong - lend him the power, the energy, to be more than a match for his opponent without the Gauntlet, and he could succeed where so many others had failed. Get his throne, the throne that should be his. Shatter Asgard and rule it in one fell swoop, and preside over what they would eventually come to call the real Great Beginning.


	8. Chapter 8

Taking the word of a guy known for lies even before he was known for murder was probably not the best idea, and she knew it. So she started digging for information about the existence of an Eternal Flame in as many unconnected areas of this strange, disconnected life in Asgard as she could.

“Jane?”

“What?”

“Do you remember when Olympics year is?”

“No.” She pulled the pencil from behind her ear angrily and carried on writing.

It hadn’t been her Darcy had wanted to get interested. “Olympus?”

“Olympics,” she repeated, smiling at Thor’s puzzled frown. “Sporting event, starts with a big opening ceremony. I didn’t wanna miss the torch.”

“Is it a tournament?” Thankfully, Jane chose that moment to huff at her page. “I think we should not disturb Jane at the moment…”

“Yeah, it’s a tournament. Kinda. You wanna stop hovering over her? She doesn’t normally like that.”

When he did tear himself away, she started telling him about the Olympics and nudging the subject around to the torch that never went out. It went beautifully; she was able to play enough on his confusion about Earth tech to get him curious, and then to get him to slip out that they had a similar artefact in Asgard, only they didn’t need to keep charcoal for it.

After she quizzed him a bit on the mechanics (nothing about the power; she wasn’t a cosmic threat in the making, oh no), he offered to take her to see it. She smiled and gleefully accepted, but took her phone with a simplified version of the calculator for the formulae installed on it along with her.

Thor trusted the people he loved, whether friends, relatives, helpers or lovers, and apparently he’d never hesitated to love. She bubbled about scientific discovery and how interesting everything here was, and she knew he’d never suspect a thing. In some ways Darcy feared for the future of Asgard.

He invited Jane too, and the three of them went traipsing through the warren of tunnels beneath Odin’s court and under the mountains until they reached the water well. When they’d arrived they’d been told about this, the giant tunnel through the heart of Asgard that, through a gravity reversal, sucked the water that fell from the world’s edge back up to continue the water cycle, but nothing compared to the reality. The passage they walked along twisted in its walls until they were walking on what had been the ceiling, and descending up a flight of stairs into the weapons vault.

The Eternal Flame was instantly distinct from the massive braziers that lit the vault. She could feel the energy being given off - was this what the Tesseract felt like, close up?- and could feel -

\- the slight desire to burst into cackles and grow a big black mustache to twirl, actually. She frowned. But then - she thought about that theory that had buzzed around SHIELD, that the Tesseract drew on what you were inside and made it more; if this worked the same way, apparently she needed to work on avoiding cliche a bit more. Or it could just be that her plot was distinctly dastardly and she was enough of a geek to want to celebrate it. Either one.

Jane was already taking readings from it, and she knew perfectly well she could get into the other woman’s data banks, so she decided to deflect attention by going around and looking at the other stuff.

The glowy hand-thing had to be the Gauntlet. “Hey, what is this? It’s like it was made for Hellboy or something.”

It was a good thing Thor never 100% understood what Jane was doing and was happy to be distracted. “It is the Infinity Gauntlet. My father took it from a lord of Titan many centuries ago.”

“Yeah? I’m guessing by ‘took from’ you mean ‘forcibly wrested from’. What happened?”

“Without it, he and his armies fell, and either he died or retreated into the depths of the cosmos. Heimdall has not seen him.”

“It’s pretty cool. Shiny.” Lord of Titan. She’d have to look that up. At least she now had a handle on who, exactly, was being drawn to Asgard by it. A grin danced around her mouth; this was fun, all this double-crossing and digging and plotting. It was all essentially politics, and even after switching majors to be able to do this, studying that was the one mistake she hadn’t made.

Before she left the vault, she picked at a hangnail, tore off a piece of skin and tucked it into a corner. In her experiments, she’d found that having a beacon helped - and what better beacon than one’s own flesh? Gross, yes, but parts of the self having a connection to the whole had all sorts of historical precendence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm afraid I have basically made up Thanos' biography from the bits we know apply to the MCU and some aspects of comics canon.


	9. Chapter 9

Thanos of Titan, who had killed most of his own people before Odin came down on him like a ton of bricks and nicked his glove. Didn’t the old guy know that that was nearly the classic duel-challenge manouevre? Anyway, fun guy for Loki to have fallen in with. Darcy filed the information away in case she needed it against her sort-of ally.

The next step was to look at the design for Loki’s cell and see how it could be broken open. Briefly she contemplated leaving him there - he was cute but reminded her of the freaky dude she’d dated for a week in the first year of college who liked pulling the wings off flies and had a couple of red buttons that seemed to turn off the logic switches in his brain - but no, that would be silly. Thor still visited him every day and could easily be told of her plans before they were ripe. Anyway, if she brought him along and failed she could always bring back the escaped war criminal and be called a hero, or claim he’d kidnapped her.

Asgardians didn’t do gunpowder. She’d noticed that pretty quickly. And yes the cells had to be strong to stand up to the strength of your average Asgardian, but she was sure they could still be blown open. To be on the safe side, she picked up about six more discharges than would normally be needed from a secure vault on Earth - ha, solve that one, bitches - and bespelled them to invisibility. She told Loki she’d set them off as soon as she had the flame. In reality, they were timed to go off about two minutes before she got it - long enough to blame the theft on him, but not long enough that a better watch could be placed on the weapons vault.

For her part, she stood in front of the mirror with a bucket of dirt and shaped herself a solid illusory counterpart. It would leave the room an hour or two after the theft, get some food, croak, ‘I feel sick’ and go back. Then, after she was worlds away, it would mess up every blanket it had as though fighting and dissolve out of the window. A perfect staged kidnapping - and Loki knew none of it.

There was enough mess in her room to disguise the stuff she’d hidden in a cranny on the underside of Asgard. She took a deep breath as she tied her hair back; this was it. She was ready. Even if she wasn’t quite able to manipulate gravity in order to carry the flame as though it was a feather, she was ready. She could lift it, and she could carry it. This was going to work.

Her netbook beeped. The charges would have gone off. Grinning, she seized it and began the formulae, began plunging through the fabric of Asgard and into the weapons vault. Quickly she dashed into the niche where the fire was. Any guards? Not yet.

The first time she picked it up, she nearly dropped it, but the second time she got it into the pocket dimension she’d set up. So far so good. Start the formul-

Shit there was a guard. Just the one. Jane said once that Loki stabbed Thor during the battle in New York. A sprinkling of dirt provided her with a dagger, and she reached out when the guard came by, pulled them into the niche and slit their throat. Carefully she pushed them away to avoid getting any blood on her rather nice green cardigan.

Before the adrenaline faded she started moving, and was falling through the stars again to her little safe nook. There, she stood looking at her perfectly steady hands. She’d read once that it was unrealistic for a character in a story to feel nothing over their first kill, but - a smile flickered on her face - apparently not.

She hadn’t felt bad when she tazed Thor, either, now she thought about it. Not really.

The prize was hers, that was what mattered. Loki would be out - good idea to actually meet him, or not? Carefully she opened the pocket dimension and took a look. Inside the fire crackled; she could feel its power dancing on her skin, and was painfully aware how little she knew. As long as she was vigilant for misinformation, she could get lessons off him. And she had the knowledge of Thanos of Titan, the faked kidnapping, and the flame itself to bargain with.

Pocket dimensions were the easiest form of magic there was, and also the hardest to overpower.


	10. Chapter 10

Sooner or later Darcy’s luck had always been going to run out. If she was honest, she’d been surprised it hadn’t done so round about the time she was experimenting with magics she didn’t fully understand; this hitch, the appearance of a huge, scaly creature she’d never seen before on the undersurface of Asgard, was mild in comparison.

Loki was dodging it so far with illusions that flickered in front of it, but he was still wearing the light, unarmoured clothes from the prison and if it once got a decent hit on him, he was out. Well, probably less out than she would be. Humming Eye of the Tiger, she readied her own magics and waited for him to become exhausted. Sometimes this endeavour made her feel like Jack Sparrow - Captain Jack Sparrow - with the whole ‘always looking for leverage’ thing.

Unfortunately he spotted her. “You have the flame, destroy it!”

“I thought you were a god? Anyway, I’m enjoying the view.” She waited a minute or two, just enough for him to stumble, before she opened the pocket dimension and drew out a huge, almost unmanageable surge of power. It filled her, her mouth, her lungs, her vision - and she sent it flying out at the creature, enveloping its head and burning up its air.

It thrashed for a few minutes, and then was still. She sealed the pocket dimension and shuffled it around so it wasn’t in the same place it had been when it was open.

“They know,” he said, standing on legs that she noticed with a twitch of the lips were slightly shaky. The time in prison had evidently taken its toll.

“What?”

“This - thing -” he kicked it “- is a bilgestipe. You wouldn’t know, but they never come onto this surface of Asgard. It’s been sent, and someone must have given away where we were going.”

She backed away. “Hey, wasn’t me. Seriously, it wasn’t. And I’m using cloaking spells that should hide me from Heimdall, sooo…”

“Give me the flame.”

Quickly she fumbled the tazer out of her pocket. “No. Told you I wasn’t gonna be your sidekick.”

“You think that pathetic weapon will defend you?”

As he jumped towards her, she slammed the last of the power boost she’d taken from the flame into the tazer and fired. He tumbled to the ground in a heap.

“Yes I do.”

\- - -

Damn he was heavy, and Darcy wasn’t quite sure she had enough arms. Carefully she threaded herself through every strap she had, tucked the pocket dimension inside her cardigan and heaved him on top of her bags. At least that way if she lost her grip he probably wouldn’t fall away.

It was too much hassle to try an unfamiliar planet with an unconscious supervillain and too many bags. She fell through Asgard and into the holiday cabin her great-uncle had abandoned years ago. Leaky roof, ick. At least they wouldn’t be disturbed.

That thing with the tazer was maybe a bit hasty, on reflection. They needed plans, surveillance, a place to lie low and an upfront conversation about boundaries, because if he was going to keep jumping her he was going to have to get very used to being unconscious.

Dumping Loki on the floor in a somewhat more sheltered corner - it was the middle of summer and he was immortal, he wouldn’t die of it - she retreated into the other room and started putting enchantments around it. They would scream and wake her if anyone tried to come in from any direction, extradimensional or not. Then she tried to relieve her iTunes withdrawal, but no internet signal anymore. Just her luck.

She slept soundly and didn’t dream of blood and dying guards, but she did dream of fire flickering in the darkness. Her hands closed on the entrance to the pocket dimension and held it close.


	11. Chapter 11

To her surprise, she woke up before him; she would have been a bit freaked out if he hadn’t been tossing and muttering. If she’d meant to kill him she would have done it on the underside of Asgard, or rather let the bilgerat-thing do it for her.

Now for phase two of the plan, which involved a bit of shopping around Earth. This new method of shopping was great fun, actually; it was so easy to just fall into the back room of a shop, grab something off the shelf, and fall through the floor again. Once she had her bit of water and ethanol, she fell into the back room of an internet cafe and looked it up online. This older girl she’d dated for a month back in high school used to carry fire in her hands, and it had been really easy. Now, it would be really useful.

Mixture safely bottled, she went back to the little cabin and opened up the pocket dimension. Inside the brazier was almost weightless and the shock of Earth’s gravity hitting it as she brought it out nearly made her drop it.

She did drop it onto the table when Loki screamed from behind her and then yelled, “How dare you?! What did you do?”

The dark energy filling her from the flame let her catch him and push him backwards before he reached her. “I tazed you then you went unconscious.” It took her a second to remember that the problem was probably the fact that Asgardians didn’t sleep; his eyes were wilder than normal and he looked half-crazed. Well, more half-crazed than normal anyway.

“I saw - things -” The second’s show of possible vulnerability was quickly shut down, and he hissed, “I didn’t help you to be treated like this, mortal. We had a deal!”

“Yeah you didn’t help your own cause, with that whole jumping me and making out you were better than me. So the deal kinda changed, since I obviously can’t trust you.”

There was something strange about the way the heat played on her back, and suddenly he was pushing back at her. She drew on the dark energy once more and so did he, they were both using it - why had she taken it out of the pocket dimension? - and he knew more little runarounds, he was creeping around her magic and doing things that she would definitely need the computer for. Biting her lip, she sucked on the flame.

For a second she thought it worked, that her surge of raw power had overwhelmed him, but then she was being blasted aside and she knew perfectly well that she’d lost this battle.

Luckily, she hadn’t let go of the bag with her bottle in it.

The first thing Loki did was snap her computer with all the calculations software in half. That had taken weeks to build up, and it had about six limited-edition songs on it that you couldn’t find anywhere, she’d tried. For those, he would pay.

“You mortals and your toys - what did you hope to achieve?” As he spoke, he was doing something with the flame; she could feel the dark energy and the heat retreating from the room. “A foolish grab for power, trying to raise yourself above your origins? You are nothing; did you truly believe that you could keep from me the power that is truly and rightfully mine?”

Oh god he really was monologing. Apparently Dad had taught a few tricks, although this really was substandard. How was this her life? Pretending to be gripping her bag with fear, Darcy rummaged for a little can that she’d got hold of as backup for her tazer.

Apparently he cared more about the flame than about watching her. Brilliant. “All your pretended power cannot change what you really are, a crawling form of life good only for ruling over, for taking and using like a piece in a larger game.”

It was there. Quietly she put it where she could pick it up easily and started pouring some of the contents of the bottle over her hands. It had to be right. If she got this wrong she was both toast and screwed.

“You place yourself in the path of destruction and then wonder why it comes to you, when you have ventured into worlds you cannot comprehend with power you do not even understand.”

She was ready, but the speech was just getting amusing. If they were ever going to work together, she’d have to give him the Evil Overlord List - for the moment, better that he kept exposing his weak underbelly.

“Foolish child! Did you hope to bring light to this rotten world, like your friends before you? Is it just power that you crave, when you could not hope to rise to a thr-“

With all the speed she’d learned in middle school gym, she jumped up and sprayed him with the mace, catching him mostly in the face. The distraction was all she needed. It didn’t matter that he’d drawn off all the dark energy into himself, or it shouldn’t - she reached over and put her hands into the flame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These days I'm never sure whether I think Asgardians sleep or not. However, I wrote about them not doing earlier in this fic so it's going to have to stand.


	12. Chapter 12

It didn’t burn. It didn’t burn.

Behind her she could feel him casting spells to try to hit her away again, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Nothing except the blinding surge of pure energy twisting around her bones and ripping through her body.

It hurt, but it didn’t burn. The power was there, it was coming to her like doors opening in her mind, showing her how the formulae worked, how the numbers worked, writing the software into her neural wiring and speeding everything up. Seconds passed like hours.

At last she felt heat and pulled her hands out of the flame. They were still on fire, so she opened a pocket dimension, thrust them into it and sucked away the oxygen. It was so easy, so fast; there was no need to think about it because the answers were just there, obvious and intuitive. She wasn’t sure exactly what power the flame had bumped up, but it had worked.

She threw what was left of her mixture in the bottle through a broken window and into the forest, well out of his reach. “So what was that about nothing?” she asked.

Mace was obviously not a thing in Asgard, either. Like sleep. He wasn’t screaming and she gave him unwilling props for that, but he was clawing at his eyes like that would help and not paying her any attention at all. She let him carry on for a bit, and then - formulae flickered through her head - opened a portal into a waterfall out of the window. “Wash your eyes out in that. Breathe normally. It’ll hurt for a bit and you might’ve hurt yourself already, but you should be fine.”

He stumbled out and she sat down heavily. The numbers and words and pure thoughts sleeted through her head far too quickly and it was starting to give her a headache. Hopefully she wasn’t going to need to pull any more surprises on him because she was running out, although with this huge amount of extra thought in her head, she could probably turn a few more tricks.

If he had been able to direct all the flame’s dark energy to himself, Darcy should be able to undo it. This newfound power, or whatever it was, didn’t patch up holes in her knowledge, but it did mean that she could follow paths down the rabbit hole and work things out. The method she eventually used was roundabout, but it worked and long before Loki came back inside she had the dark energy free to go where it would and the brazier back in a pocket dimension.

Formulae flickered in her eyes like rainbows across the abyss, or shining waterdroplets in sunlight. So much she didn’t understand, but so much that was there, at her fingertips…

“What state is the ‘deal’ in?”

She whipped around to face him, but the tone of his voice - and his fingers fumbling on the wall - said he was past fighting. “Colorado, currently.”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t get it. Yeah I really hope you’re not thinking of trying to double-cross me again because I’m getting bored of having to stop you.”

“If I agree not to double cross you again, what are the terms of our agreement?”

“I need to know more about magic. You teach me, and you use the All-Tongue to help me find a power base, and once that’s done you get one of the Eternal Coals or whatever they are.”

“I will accept, if you tell me how to counteract your bottled agony.”

Bottled agony. Good thing he couldn’t see her grinning. “To quote Jane, deal. Just keep washing it and don’t cover it up, blink a lot and get tears everywhere. Make sure you breathe deeply. You might wanna suck on a lemon, that helps if you’ve got it in your lungs, and you could go nick some baby shampoo. You’re past the worst, to be honest.”

Later, she found herself stifling a smile at his look of utter distate at the lemon and wondering whether a convincing case for taking pepper spray away from police forces known for brutality could be constructed by pointing out that this was a dude who’d fallen into Thanos’ hands. On the other hand, they might just take that as encouragement.


	13. Chapter 13

There was a lot to learn. Asgardians could only go beyond simple, formulaic magic because they had hundreds of human lifespans to master every principle, every step of the way. A mastery of magic such as Loki’s took centuries to cultivate, even with the fact that they had longer to develop their brains.

Apparently sticking her hands into the flame had taken her so far beyond that level as to be unrecognisable. She might be mortal still, but time outside of her own mind passed so slowly while the connections and thoughts crackled faster than she could talk in her head. Things were clear, simple; she understood things almost faster than he could explain them.

That didn’t extend to everything. They plotted, with maps and diagrams and quick scouting trips to other realms, and she insisted on learning the Alltongue but that just didn’t work. She could see how it could be mastered, but she’d never been very good at learning new languages - just ask her seventh-grade French club teacher - and the flame hadn’t helped in that capacity. It seemed it made you better at what you were good at, which in her case was humanities and sciences.

Eventually she hatched a plan to gain her a means of filtering languages through the Alltongue. Trusting Loki to accurately translate was suicide - bad enough that she was trusting him to teach the language - so she needed a way to understand other languages. Communication could be achieved in other ways, but only if she could understand what was going on.

By now, he’d managed to get himself a solid set of armour with knives in all the old hidden dimensions. Shame really. The prison tunic was thin and she was pretty sure he hadn’t been wearing anything under it. For her own part, she had several decoys ready to go as well as a shield made from the flame’s dark energy ready to fling up at the first sign of trouble.

Stealing one of Stark’s spare arc reactors to power her translator device shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Burning her bridges yet wasn’t her intention, so Darcy first stole some hair dye; purple, after some consideration, although she had to bleach it first. Stark knew Thor and there was no need for him to describe a dark-haired chick the Asgardian knew when talking about the raid. Hopefully there’d be nothing to be described, but if years of watching films and TV had taught her anything it was ‘never take anything for granted.’

She offered it to Loki just because she wanted to see him with purple hair - “C’mon, purple and green go great together! You could be the inverted Joker!” - but no such luck. Oh well. It didn’t matter if anyone recognised him.

Falling through Midgard and into Stark’s armour basement was easy, and they stood in front of the racks of glowing armours. “He wears two of those circles of light,” Loki hissed at her, and then vanished. A few muttered curses later, the armour stretched from the inside out and he raised a hand inside the glass case, pointing at her.

Alarms went off from every direction and she winced, catching his blast on her energy shield and leaping towards him. Quickly she grabbed the reactor and twisted, holding his arms away from her until she had it and pocketed it. By that point, there were more reactor blasts coming from behind her. “Hey, I thought I had security in this place after that little demolition last year.”

Stark.

Next to her Loki was struggling inside the armour and if she wanted to get the Alltongue translator up and running she had to give him time to get out. Her decoys looked almost, but not quite, unlike her - they flickered into existence, taking their substance from the stuff of the workshop.

“Whoa now, I am in a mostly-stable relationship, I do not get distracted that easily.”

She mingled with two of them and stepped behind a table, letting him loose his reactor blasts at the spectres as they moved in to hit him with anything they could find. Loki seemed to have ripped the armour to pieces, and for a second he looked at Stark and Stark looked at him and said, “You got out on parole fast huh? Good behaviour? Somehow I doubt it.”

Then Loki was gone and she let her decoys fall back to the floor while she fell through it and landed in a crouch back in the cabin. “The deal was that you stop trying to overpower me and shove me out of the way!”

“I was testing you, and you wouldn’t have got it out of the case if I hadn’t done it!”

“I don’t care. You stop or there is no way you are getting a coal of that flame! Plus I could take you back to Asgard and hand you back over; after all, they think you’ve kidnapped me. I’d be a hero.”

“They think what?”

“Yeah, didn’t I tell you?” She knew perfectly well she hadn’t, but the look on his face was worth everything. “I rigged it to blow earlier than I said, and I stuck a decoy in my rooms so that they’d think I was still there. Programmed it to struggle as though being dragged out of the window. They’ll think you stole the flame and kidnapped me.”


	14. Chapter 14

“I’ll bear it in mind,” he’d said, and Darcy had had basically nothing out of him since. Either it meant she’d won, or it meant that he was plotting something very, very bad for her. Either way, it gave her peace and quiet to adapt the arc reactor to the more metaphysical aspects of her translator.

The silence got annoying, though, so she started needling. She’d had about as many compliments on her singing voice as replies to her political placement applications, and more insults than songs on her playlist. Singing filled the silence and made Loki stretch his hands in irritation that she was pretty sure he didn’t know she knew about. It distracted him from the fact that she was having to leave the pocket dimension open a lot more to power the translator.

Better still, once she got him to start inputting the Alltongue it distracted him from the fact that he was tired because she was probing his magic. The words he spoke were laced with it and it was something that she could use - magic was only energy, after all, even if his was slightly different to hers. If she channelled it, it would give her another shield he didn’t know about, another source of power over him. Wannabe world dictators were always going to be tricky to subdue, and this one had managed an ancient rep as a trickster.

Time went on, and nothing happened. It was almost worrying. She’d pose him a question about the other words as they weighed up advantages and disadvantages, and he’d give her what she asked - no more, so he was probably not currying favour, but no less either.

She needed worlds that weren’t stable, worlds that had the resources but not the ability to rise, worlds that needed rescuing, worlds that needed legends, worlds that - most importantly - wouldn’t kill her. It limited her search to Yggdrasill, to those Nine Realms where for whatever reason, chemistry and physics and biology didn’t conspire to kill people with her body composition, but rather sheltered them.

Being short-livedly mortal would have its advantages. She didn’t need a Thousand Year Reich - she just needed a strong one. Even ‘would care for her in her old age,’ wasn’t that high a priority, as long as in the meantime she had the power to shape the cosmos. Darcy Lewis, empress of worlds, whose glory would go down in galactic history -

Darcy Lewis, empress of worlds sounded stupid. For now. Two, three years from now?

Her world would fear it and love it in the same breath.


	15. Chapter 15

Darcy didn’t feel mortal, and not in the way that old people always said young people did. She felt like she had more time than she could even comprehend, more time, more space, more things, more knowledge - anything that used to move quickly now moved interminably, frustratingly slowly, and if her life was going to be short it was the longest short she’d ever known. In her however-long-she-got, she would think thousands of times more than any ancient Asgardian.

But still, she chose a world where most of the inhabitants weren’t so long-lived, a world that had been squabbling among itself even before it might or might not have been the impact site for the falling Bifrost, a world, moreover, with resources and the beginnings of industry.

When they fell onto the surface of the planet, one look confirmed the instability. In front of them there was a small settlement held together only with ice. “You recognise this?” she asked Loki, walking softly on the frosted ground.

“The Casket must have fallen here.”

“And someone must be able to wield it.” That made things harder. She melted open doors with a touch and went into the houses among the ice-cold statues of people - elves - whatever - who had only just started to flee. Chests had been tipped all over the floor, their contents stiff with ice. Some of them she picked up, clothes and food. All of that would be needed.

When he joined her, she caught a flash of revulsion on his face and noticed that he was being very careful not to touch anything. “Scared of the ghosts?”

He didn’t answer, but later on nor would he eat anything she had taken.

He wouldn’t disguise himself, either, so she rolled her eyes and said, “Suit yourself,” taking a pile of clothes behind a house to find something that fitted. It was too much to hope that she might stumble upon any mithril, but even so she needed something that wouldn’t look too alien. She could add the alien herself.

In the end she settled on a belted tunic-dress that was black unless she made it glimmer with the fires of a thousand forges, over several layers of shirts and trousers to combat the cold. Over it all she put a sheepskin cloak that was brown-black unless she made it shine with the depth of space. Have to tick all the wizard boxes if you want to inspire legends.

Dressing to impress, however, was not what she wanted to do when incognito amongst her future subjects. She sat with her head buried in a ridiculous horn of elvish something-alcoholic, vanishing it slowly into another dimension and allowing her translator to bring the chatter to her ears. At the other end of the room Loki was drawing the conversation the way she wanted it drawn, and everyone’s attention was on the pale dude with the snazzy clothes rather than her. She’d rather they’d both been completely unremarkable, but getting him to dress normally for whatever culture he was in was apparently impossible. Every request she made was met with noncommittal noises until she gave up.


	16. Chapter 16

It was more unstable than they’d thought here, evidently. These people - elves - ah whatever, she could call them people if she wanted to - were smallfolk, keeping their heads down and hoping none of the multiple sides raging across the land would notice them, whether it was the groups who just killed and looted or the groups that froze.

About halfway through the evening, someone came panting through the door. “They’re coming!” she yelled, and instantly the room was emptying. Darcy joined in the rush with everyone else, nudging herself closer to Loki.

“This is the wrong place for a stand, but I need to see the opposition,” she hissed at him, and they peeled off behind the houses while the others ran for the trees. When she made her stand, it had to be somewhere bigger, more notable, and she had to have the largest possible opposition. It would be a statement.

They came rushing into the village with torches held aloft, looking a bit like a cross between the Vikings of an illustrator’s dream and a monk’s nightmare. There was no power behind them. Either she or Loki could take them alone. But for the inhabitants of the village they would have been opponent enough, so they were deprived of their prey.

Suddenly lightning split the sky, and thunder rolled across after it. Next to her, Loki jumped out of his skin. “Oh come on. What are the chances?”

He shot her an absolutely scathing glance.


	17. Chapter 17

To her astonishment, it seemed he was right; a red and silver blur dropped like a stone into the centre of the village. The raiders stopped - hesitated - started running.

A moment later they were milling in confusion, turning back on themselves and apparently trapped between Thor and some other force. They were pressed in, anyone who didn’t squeeze in fast enough being thrown into buildings by Mjollnir. Before long they were all either dead or lying groaning on the floor, and Thor stepped over their bodies to the shapes of four others.

Lady Sif and the Warriors Three.

Behind them were more Asgardians, now rushing in to drag away the groaning shapes of the raiders.

“We must go,” he whispered.

“Yup!”

Quickly they retreated backwards until the light of their departure wouldn’t be noticed, and fell through the stuff of reality until they reached their makeshift camping ground.

The moment they were there, he spat, “We cannot stay here. Not with him around. There is nothing for you here! Not while Asgard stakes its claim. They will trample this world and call it liberation and leave you no room to claim it -“

“Nah, this is perfect. As long as you lay low, I can be Asgard’s hero by stopping whoever’s got the Casket and I can be Svartalfarheim’s hero by stopping Asgard doing what it did to Jotunheim and giving them a way to recover after all this. Perfect. And you back me and don’t let the Asgardians see you, then when we win you sneak off to do whatever world-dominatey things you wanna do.” She tapped the side of her nose. “I studied politics.”

He didn’t reply, just kept pacing. Every movement seemed to want to rip out of his body and into the void between worlds again, but he didn’t.

Light flickered around the fire’s pocket dimension, and she realised that in her haste to make sure he couldn’t dispose of her she hadn’t kept a close enough eye on it. He’d found it, and he’d woven his magic ready to open it.

Fuck. Fuckity fuck. How had she got so distracted? Having thoughts that ran so much faster than time was a curse as much as a blessing, as they both moved in seeming slo-mo. She was trying to block the dimension, he to reach it. It was open - whoever got there first would win. There were no magics to help - she tried pulling it shut but he was directly opposite the opening and could suck the dark energy towards him, and trying to close it then was like trying to strangle a tree.

The guy who’d had centuries of war training against the human who’d ditched gym. Yeah, great odds.

And she’d calculated them correctly.

“I won’t kill you. You can go back to your friends and weave all the lies you want about me, and they won’t be able to touch me or they’ll burn. You couldn’t have hoped to wield it properly anyway.” Carefully he removed it and stared at his hand for a moment.

Dread and utter disappointment stopped her realising what he was about to do. Maybe some part of her brain registered it, but most was flicking through plans faster than light and finding all of them wanting. Fuck. This was worse than failing art. At least she hadn’t cared about art.

She was not, however, too distracted to notice his yelp of pain and subsequent leap backwards.

With her accelerated thought, it looked like it took him a long time to jump backwards. His hand was blackening, the skin apparently unable to take even such a short exposure, and she threw herself between him and the flame so she could put an energy barrier in place. Quickly Darcy thrust it into a pocket dimension and shut it, moving it around on her body and placing a decoy so that he wouldn’t be able to find it again.

By the time she turned, Loki’s sleeve was on fire as well. “Stop drop and roll, dude,” she called out, and left him there.

Doing this on her own wasn’t what she wanted, but it was obvious that he was going to be more trouble than he was worth. She could manage. Increasing her speed of thought hadn’t increased her speed of action much, but it had increased sureness. When you had ages to think about making a move, you tended to make it right. As long as she kept out of the direct line of fire of people like Thor, she’d be okay. She had her little personal simulacra.


	18. Chapter 18

They already had the lay of the land, the places where the warring camps and the villagers lay hidden from each other half a mile away and the narrow, dark paths they ran along to communicate. There was a village network not too far, and she fell through the universe until she stood on a hill overlooking it.

Carefully she found the nearest war camp and crept around it, listening to them. No big leaders here, then, just a group of warriors looking to burn and pillage with the blessing of their lord. They wanted a village. She would give it to them, and they would wish they had known better.

Darcy positioned herself where she could see and sent out the first simulacrum. Its solidity meant that it could knock stones down the hillside just in front of a patrol of guards from the camp.

They jumped. A couple of them went to investigate it. Smiling slightly, she twitched her fingers and it scrambled up the hill towards one of the hidden paths. They followed.

Once they found it, that was when the shouting broke loose; warriors sprinted back to the camp to get reinforcements, and soon dozens of them were pouring towards the villages. Torches blazed in their hands and they held weapons aloft and ready. The villagers were still asleep.

Quickly she fell through the worlds - quicker to do that than to walk the half-mile or so to the village; how easily she was getting used to the little advantages of power! - until she stood hidden in the village as they crashed into it, fire flickering on blood as the first inhabitants stumbled from their bed. She waited. As the battle wore on, someone with training took control and set up defences, organised what was left of the village, but it was inevitably going to be too late.

Someone in the village blew a horn - not a war-horn, a cry for help from the neighbours. Heart pounding in her chest, she waited still and changed her clothes into the shimmering stuff of sorcery she’d designed to impress. Eat your heart out, Gaga, she thought.

The neighbours should be awake by now. This was her moment.


	19. Chapter 19

Her second simulacrum flickered into existence in the very centre of the fighting, slipping daggers into six attackers’ backs before they knew it was there and dissolving into dust before they could hit it. Then the next. And the next. They drove the attackers away from the villagers, and she opened the pocket dimension ready to impress.

An energy barrier between her and the floor took shape and she floated into the middle of the gap. It was really hard to do and to concentrate on, she realised, as her simulacra all crumbled to dust at the same moment. Rather than battle on with them, she just drew on the dark energy of the flame and clamped blindingly bright curtains of light across every attacker’s eyes at once.

Most of them dropped, screaming; the twilight of this world meant that they were almost certainly unused to anything a fraction of the brightness.

Behind her a group from the neighbouring village came charging in, only to stop in amazement. She retracted the light, and conjured an illusion - damn not being able to speak Allspeak - that showed her, giant-size, handing the attackers to the villagers. Then she gestured around, smiled, and tumbled through the worlds once more.

From her new vantage point she watched them move forwards with grim delight, driving pitchforks and stakes into the prone attackers’ throats. She could hear them talking about how much they’d always wanted to do it, and, more gratifyingly, about herself. The Pale Lady, they were calling her. It wasn’t a bad name - well, it was a name a legend could be built on.

Tomorrow night, she would add another brick to the legend. Now, however, she would sleep. Accelerated thought or no, she was still very, very human.

\- - -

In between foiling raids, some of which she baited and others of which she didn’t, she started settling into a clearing in the dark woods. Carefully she braided ropes of light around the trees, setting them with magical jewels, and let shimmering mists drift between the trees near travellers. Simulacra of her flickered through the forest, tantalising all comers. She, of course, slept miles away in an abandoned hut.

She started leaving shining maps to the place behind her after raids, and soon the first dark elves showed up - civilians, ragged and hungry, mostly in small groups sent to check the place out. Many left once they saw her, once she teleported to Midgard and stole a table of food to feed them, and brought back others of their kin.

Her army was growing.

The first attack came from the group that didn’t have the Casket. They stormed the forest by night, from several directions, but Darcy cast illusions to change the placement of the trees, twisted the paths in on each other and eventually led them out to a canyon. There, she made the abyss seem solid until they fell off the edge.

Statement made, she led her people out of the forest and set up open camp. She wove light into the very hills - let this Casket-wielder come - so that it could announce her presence to all as well as warn her when they came. This world had been long ready for the taking.

No lightning split the sky, to her relief. Perhaps Asgard was going to sit this little confrontation out, and deal with the winners.


	20. Chapter 20

The wait was long and agonising, and as her forces became more impatient she decided to swing phase II of her plan into motion early. Not being able to actually talk directly was getting more frustrating by the day - they didn’t speak Alltongue, surely she could teach them English eventually - but she got the message across eventually. A woman told her how many workshops in her village, and quickly she got an idea of the industrial backing of her own power base. It was painfully old fashioned - no automation at all, and they’d only just broken into fossil fuels. For a moment she considered attempting to introduce arc reactor tech, but given events on Earth that would be a banner trailed across the sky with, ‘LOKI (and Mystery Accomplice) WOZ ERE’ written on it.

Damn tech and the fact that you could normally trace its origins.

Her ghostly communicative illusions flickered in front of a few select members of her following, chosen carefully for the influence they held and their loyalty to her. Keep this secret, she told them, these are sacred secrets of my people, and you are chosen to receive them, but they must not be revealed. The other advantage of her accelerated thought was that she could cry with laughter in her head long before it forced its way onto her face.

Solemnly they vowed to reveal it to none save their workers, and some of them sneaked off. She’d given them the processes to make weapons, first, since war was their business now, and told them that the secrets lived in the developing. They should come back with a lot Earth-like weapons - nothing too advanced, and nothing dependent on the distinctively Earthling gunpower - with distinctive elvish twists.

Time went by, and other, more distant groups came to her - some looked only to trade, but others wanted the secret. These last she swore to her service, harvested soldiers from and sent trusted followers with in return for processes. Soon she could almost hear the planet hiss with the name of the Pale Lady, who had chosen them to receive the secrets of the gods and given them the means to defend themselves.

Still the wielder of the Casket did not come.


End file.
